Over the next few posts, I'm going to explore where, and
how, WSE 2.0 fits in with BizTalk 2004. I know some of you are thinking,
well, we have this wonderful WSE adapter that allows us to retreive SOAP
messages and have all the (or at least some) of the benefits of WSE
(WS-Addressing, WS-Policy, etc). That's true, we do... BUT, what happens if we want to receive
messages over a transport other than HTTP? Many times, in a SOA
environment it is necessary to support guaranteed delivery. This is not
possible over HTTP. WSE gives us the ability to define our own custom
transports. Therefore, from a WSE standpoint we could receive messages via
MQ to support our guaranteed delivery requirement. If we do that then we
can't use the WSE adapter.
On my current project, I'm exploring ways of
dealing with WSE compliant messages, without using the WSE adapter. This
of course will require development of a custom pipeline to deal with some of the
things the adapter takes care of like handling the WS-Addressing headers,
digital certificates, etc. Another thing I'm exploring is implementing WSE
pipelines inside of a BizTalk pipeline. This allows you to add custom
filters to the WSE pipeline through configuration...pretty powerful. I'm
not sure what the implications, if any, are however.
Stay tuned as I post my findings!!
Cheers,
Todd